The darkest place on earth lies two miles below the waves of the arctic circle and two more into the rocky hide of the planet. A tungsten lip kisses virgin earth in a bedroom impenetrably black and only a few centimeters wide. A great single root of greased gunmetal holding above it an inky willow, her highest fathoms melting into the sky above even the clouds in sunless months. Branches and knots of rivets and grates and railing and corrugation splay out from her sides like arrows in a back and sway in great polar winds.
The machinery of the bore’s housing swallows sound. For leagues in all directions, the crashing of waves and wailing gusts are only gasps from somewhere beyond a wall. Her pneumatic veins and great cogwheels do not produce the expected cacophony and even the frigid rusting steel of her scaffolds do not creak as they lurch in their own immense weight. The footsteps and voices of the workers seem to follow them, a close whisper to their ears and a soft stalker creeping up a stair.
The rooms in her complex are organ-like and cramped, hazy with a dense human fog of sweat and boiler vapor. Alcoves for beds litter any wall that does not already house her mechanisms near flush against the other side of the sheet metal.
In some spaces the corridors shrink to half a man’s height while her shafts and cisterns, climbed rung by rung, could swallow skyscrapers. Her confounding size was mitigated by redundancies. Hatches and crawlspaces that- if one bared the discomfort, cold, and terrible dark -quickly traversed her labyrinth, but whose hostility and known reputation of blockages often ensured that one may never see the face of a fellow crew member more than once during their stay.
I and the dozen or so crewmen I arrived with shared a common failure of imagination. We were all too experienced and educated. In our minds we had conjured a machine.
The simple facts we were presented with did no justice to reality. That it harvested petroleum, that both it and the quantity it accessed were the largest of their kind, and that despite this the real reward would be claimed by the shipping companies due to its location.
We had all taken this information as fresh graduates of technical programs and veteran engineers and built in our minds the device. A myriad schematic of architecture, physics, and mathematics. A collected mental church to efficiency and precision.
We arrived at the scene of a crime. An uneven cluster of columnar concrete limbs clutching and cradling her. Swaddled in barbs of rusting steel ladder and catwalks in disrepair and impaled by great piers of no purpose. The cold had driven every last person into her depths.
The uneven and shapeless form of her body made it seem as though some unfathomable creature from heaven had been harpooned like a whale and chained to the earth in order to humble it and force it to kiss the feet of the planet. I recall some few among us cried.
Sympathy was not a unique thing to feel among the men attending her. In her womb they grew to love her. In her complexity they became obsessed, and were driven mad not to be able to pick at her schematics and render her components only to find the only way to touch her mechanisms would ultimately be to wound her.
Truthfully, I believed she hated them. Insufficient and misshapen things probing at her for secrets. Suitors mistaking mastery with adoration. I quickly found myself without the company of a single man that entered her with me. I could not distinguish those who had spent years within her from those freshly arrived or those she had swallowed somewhere deeper within. She terrified me. I think she knew this and it's why she teased me.
After perhaps a month for as well as I could count, nothing and everything began making sense. The church of schematic, once ruined, began to reconstruct explosively and disturbingly at once. I believed I knew her chambers and vasculature by heart within a week, but would see someone wander in a completely different direction under the same assignment. I came to find this was normal. She guided we few parasites to her workings to care for her, but refused to permit even one of her secrets. Even in discussing this with the other workers it came to light no two among us could draw the same map of her complex.The others couldn’t fathom why this horrified me.
I decided to mark a bed. This was difficult to ask for with the near unanimous understanding that bunks were not to be assigned as it was plenty hard enough just to determine whether you were looking at the same one at the end of your shift. You risked annoying the wrong person at the end of a harrowing, grief-ridden shift only to catch a spanner to the temple and unceremoniously stuffed in an access hatch to rot. There would be no repercussions, let alone anyone to wonder where you had gone.
With my starting point determined, I made it my mission to navigate in a circle- no matter how small so long as the circuit completed -back to the bed I’d selected. The practice proved trivial. Twenty meters down the hall a ladder opened into the concourse above running perpendicular to the hall. Another forty meters to a stairwell back down into a valve station, through a door into the plumbing access chute, back the same forty meters, and then a crawlspace back into the corridor I began in. I believe I traveled the route nearly a half-dozen times in astonishment. The regularity of the space was maddening. A perfect square around an arbitrarily selected point.
I would navigate this path at least once a day, absolutely certain that when I had given it ample time, the steel would shift and close and I would not find my way back. It never did. The route stayed the same.
I was reassured by my fellow crew members this was obvious. What we stood in was manufactured. It had a blueprint and architects who drafted its shape and built it accordingly. What they could not tell me was if such a thing were the case, why was it that they grieved for her. What tragedy could befall what was simply another man-made structure?
She permitted me to have this landmark. A taunt that accomplished nothing. No other crewmen abided by its navigation. Each one insisting upon themselves their feet would travel in the way she’d already shown them. There would be no maps. The bed and the circle became icons for me. I wondered what mechanism, surely crucial, lay in the center of the ring. I imagined it to be her heart.
I still had not slept in the bed. I refused to. The bunk itself was little more than a concavity in the metal which one laid themselves inside of like a morgue freezer drawer. This close to her heart I feared her attention. She’d already been watching me, racing thoughts of the precise measurements of the circular path, each time concluding she had made herself this way for me like catching the glint of an eye staring into my mind. I became convinced she would swallow me if I laid there.
I’m ashamed to say I took advantage of a newcomer. A fresh set of eyes and tears that could be wept in her cold corners. Each of us developed our routes by following others until those others disappeared or our duties separated us, iterating and re-iterating on the paths. It’s exceedingly easy to become lost or go missing within weeks of beginning a contract. I had a fresh body relying solely on my navigation for their well being and safety from the thing we were trapped inside.
I showed him the bed. I showed him the circular path and advised him to walk it once a day. This would devise for him a compass with which to find his way. I did not tell him he slept near her heart. I didn’t stop him when he chose to sleep in the bed. He was being dragged out of the crawlspace when I returned the next day.
I felt no remorse for it, nor even validation. What had I even believed to be my fate should I have slept in that bed? If I did so now? To the few I had told of the circle, they avoided the corridor like the plague from then on. I realized then what I had done to that poor soul. She only had eyes for me, and I showed her heart to another.
Nervously, I slipped myself into the mouth of the bunk. I closed my eyes and waited for anything to happen, but despite my fathomless anxiety and the pounding in my chest, my breath stilled and I fell asleep. In my dreams I saw the church.
Silvery white filigree on prussian blue stone. Brick manicured in platonic form. Mathematical precision without tolerance or misalignment. Fate drawn with a square measure into space matched in unitary destiny. To fit hand in glove with such immaculate correctness requires not simply its quantitative facts or steady hands but that it be so in staunch denial of variability. An obscene grotesquery of order.
At first it rose before me in a shape of symmetrical artistry. Its spires and buttresses typical for the vision of a cathedral. In satisfaction, I saw its columns carved and the stones of its roof slatted together and its windowsills hewn into shape. It continued. An errant staircase began to rise swiftly and unstoppably into the distance. Towers budding and branching into more towers. Masonry arranged not to form rooms or paths or doorways, but simply meandering in shapes that perverted sensible design. I watched it grow like a fungus of architecture, each new fixture incongruous and reaching, yet in its construction immaculately intentional. The deliberacy of the expansion intimated an assurance that each and every seemingly stray construction served a purpose.
My vision was consumed and I was buried under the geometric cacophony.
I awoke to the sound of ticking. A low, distant ticking, like that of a clock in a quiet room. A sound that would be destroyed in the sound of the worker’s hobnailed boots, or panting brought on by the stale air, or one's own nervous heartbeat.
That she had not harmed me was my first thought. My second was that I had never heard a more beautiful sound than her clockwork. My third was that this machine for all its grand construction and purpose, did not under any previous circumstances make a sound.
I did not have to locate it, I knew it implicitly as her heartbeat. Once more I walked along the corridor, my ear to the wall, attempting to find the ache in her. She had toyed with me for so long until I forgot entirely what time had even passed, and finally she would give up one of her secrets to me. In pity? Maybe. Still it was a secret too close to her heart for another to find.
It persisted on through the concourse and the cute, ringing clearer through the pipes as I traveled. I knew before I started I would find it in the crawlspace. That ring around her heart, she arranged it just so. It was not her mischief that showed me a confounding display of ordinariness in so unnatural a being, it was preservation. She could not thwart my prodding of her core without harming herself. I would not be permitted to walk the circle in any other way to find it. I imagine the newcomer discovered this the hard way.
The crawlspace, like all her shortcuts, is a grease-black vent barely wide for a human to fit. It’s never been unusual to see a body clogged inside of one. I wondered if she chose who would come to rest in these dark capillaries. Now imagining she loved me, I wondered if she would want to keep me.
I squeezed and crawled until I saw the red lamplight of the corridor again, streaming lightly through the end of the tunnel. I laid only feet from where the newcomer had lodged himself, and by now the ticking was clear. A sweet brass pitch of mechanical noise. If she was meant to be silent, then this was a wound in her.
The sound came from a thin grate in the sheet metal. Where the newcomer had died alone and in the dark, crushed by the walls he could not have expected to bite down upon him. A little bit left of him, dried in a stain upon the slats of steel, lit only slightly by the red glow from the corridor. It would need removing to quiet her.
I gave to her my finger, slipped softly and like a nervous kiss into the opening. She received it like the fitting of a wedding band. She stole it from me like a conniving hound.
I didn’t scream. It would have been useless. She devoured the phalanges, stripping them cleanly of meat and skin as if undressing herself before a lover. In that moment, there could be no sound save the machine. The sound-swallowing behemoth, rising into the arctic clouds, sang in a low, churning voice of terrifying beauty. It quieted thought and halted movement. I could not feel nor hear my heartbeat as she bellowed each note to me in that sunless room. It was not her purpose to be silent. The sorrow and grief and guilt. That each and every one of the crew was turned into the depths and discarded. We must have known, deep within, that she was the church and that she was incomplete.
I could no longer fear her, my mourning was too great. How could you build something like this? A tower of babel, monument to the tact of human hands, and within her build the shape of one unfilled. An emptiness between the cogs and shafts and flywheels that leaves her impotent. That she fed on the ones who sought to enter her depths was in desperate need of completion, and they would rest in her stomach to rot without satisfaction.
I scrambled to tear the grate out, pounding my fist into the metal in order to nurse her with the bones and flesh from my hand in manic heartache. I would find a way inside her and I would fill her wound.
I slid more and more of my arm into the opening, feeling her undress the skin with her gears and divest me of carpal bones as her fingers meshed in mine and she pulled me inexorably closer to her chest, all the while roaring her unholy song. A wedding dirge of shrieking, pounding iron.
Sinew and fat greased the cogwheels and spokes as they wound and unknit muscle. They grinded against the shoulder bone, carving it to dust. I could feel my neck strain against the opening and eventually yield to the superior metal. Bereft of contents, my dermis tangled into the rolling jaws and pulled me forward like reigns into the clutch of the mechanism. The mathematical cathedral bridged the gap in herself with a wet gulp. I was made an anatomical cylinder in a cannibal music box. Slowly, slowly pulled outside-in and processed in her heart into visceral smears. As her bells chimed to their close my pink mash slid from her maw into the inky esophagus. Passing downward, downward through the lip below and deposited in the cauldron of black soup.
Planted with a wedding kiss four miles deep in the darkest place on earth.
